Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency

When EFF launched a campaign last year to encourage the public to help us uncover police use of biometric technology, we weren’t sure what to expect. Within a few weeks, however, hundreds of people joined us in filing public records requests around the country.

Ultimately, dozens of local government agencies responded with documents revealing devices capable of digital fingerprinting and facial recognition, while many more reported back—sometimes erroneously—that they hadn’t used this technology at all. Several, however, either didn’t respond, demanded exorbitant fees, or outright rejected the requests.

In the wake of reports this week that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ordered Yahoo to scan all of its users’ email in 2015, there are many unanswered legal and technical questions about the mass surveillance.

But before we can even begin to answer them, there is a more fundamental question: what does the court order say?

It often feels like everyone inside and outside the government agrees that over-classification of government records is a major problem. Yet a series of Freedom of Information Act requests by EFF has found that even when Congress allowed agencies to offer cash rewards to government employees to be less secretive, nobody has been collecting the money.

From cell-site simulators in New York to facial recognition devices in San Diego, law enforcement surveillance technologies are spreading across the country like an infectious disease. It’s almost epidemiological: one police department will adopt a new, invasive tool, and then the next and the next, often with little or no opportunity for the citizens to weigh in on what’s needed or appropriate for their communities. Sometimes even elected officials and judges have no idea how technologies are being used by the police under their supervision.